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Animals Using EtOH

Ham-milton

Ham-milton

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Jul 20, 2007
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I saw a video today entitled "The African Booze Tree" about a tall tree with fruits that ferment in the skins and then are eaten (the commentator on the film says they ferment in the stomach, but I find that awfully hard to believe).

Does anyone here know of any other natural occurances like this? These fruits seem like they're pretty sought after by the animals- and there's a wide assortment of species eating from them, even a couple that (AFAIK) aren't normally the fruit-indulging types.
 
Hehe yeah i saw that, funny! Dont know of any other natural occurrances but i think a lot of animals like beer.
 
a lot of organisms will eat things like that because they are colonized by other organisms (yeast) which make essential vitamins we can't get anywhere else (B12 for instance).

I for one love nutritional yeast on my popcorn
 
How would they know to eat them though? Surely the effects of being healthy are hard to correlate to eating specific things, for an animal?
(I just find it hard to believe. Being able to correlate getting wasted soon after eating something however I CAN believe)
Elephants are known to go searching at specific times for rotten fruit, and have been observed getting falling over drunk, hehe.
 
This video had elephants getting drunk in it too. It's pretty incredible, actually. These fruits aren't easy to get at- but the elephants and (even more hilarious) the giraffes work their asses off to get a buzz.
 
The animals don't have tp know they should eat them, they just do it. Instinct can be just as powerful as intellect.
 
That they keep coming back is a good reason- especially considering that they're not something easily gotten.
 
I don't think there's a whole lot of evidence to say that the video was staged by any means. It's fairly well known that elephants are overly senstive to psychoactives.
 
I don't think there's a whole lot of evidence to say that the video was staged by any means. It's fairly well known that elephants are overly senstive to psychoactives.
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Morris, Steve, David Humphreys, and Dan Reynolds. "Myth, marula and elephant: An assessment of voluntary ethanol intoxication of the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) following feeding on the fruit of the marula tree (Sclerocarya birrea) " Physiological and Biochemical Zoology 78:6.

"Assuming all other model factors are in favour of inebriation, the intoxication would minimally require that the elephant avoids drinking water, consumes a diet of only marula fruit at a rate of at least 400 percent normal maximum food intake, and with a mean alcohol content of at least 3 percent," write the authors.
Instead, the authors posit that an intoxicant other than alcohol may be responsible for "tipsy" behavior. Elephants also eat the bark of the marula tree, which is home to a beetle pupae traditionally used to poison arrow tips.
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ok now the question is is it still indeed a reinforcing desire to achieve this state of inebriation that evidently is other than from EtOH which did seem unlikley given the mass of the animal and appears conclusive to not be feasible given the amount needed to be consumed
 
It all comes down to how much ethanol it takes to get an elephant drunk- I haven't seen any data on that. We all know that the amount of other inebriants (LSD, for example) is massively lower than for humans.
 
This brings me back to the story of the heroin addicted elephant that was put on MMT not long ago.

I have observed a ferret to have a certified penchant for alcohol intoxication. It even gets agitated if it sees you taking cans of beer out of the room.
 
If its the beetle larvae I am thinking of, the toxin (diamphotoxin) is a real nasty one, comes from a species of flea beetle, and is very slow acting, causing haemolysis and rhabdomyolysis, which causes the kill.

But, its protein based and innactive orally.
 
I have a big parrot (yellow naped amazon), and when I give him most fruits, he will just eat them, but if I give him an ogange slice; that he will bury under the newspaper in his cage for about a week before he eats it. He isnt a very nice drunk, so I all but stopped giving him oranges;)
 
egor said:
I have a big parrot (yellow naped amazon), and when I give him most fruits, he will just eat them, but if I give him an ogange slice; that he will bury under the newspaper in his cage for about a week before he eats it. He isnt a very nice drunk, so I all but stopped giving him oranges;)
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are you shiitng us as that would take some real intelligence to arrive at

no doubt parrots are pretty damn bright, but that is somethin if true...used to own some myself, but just too messy to consider again
 
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